Re: Abiword

To: General Arabization Discussion <general at arabeyes dot org>

Subject: Re: Abiword

From: Arafat Medini <lumina at silverpen dot de>

Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 10:48:17 +0100

Salam,
Well we translated it indeed ;) So no need to ask anymore for
translation! You simply have to wait for the next version of Abiword,
and you'll see it all in Arabic.
Well why mandrake ignore Abi you have to ask them ;) But I mean you can
go to rpmfind.net and download the latest Abiword mdk rpms if you
want...
Well the problem with Abiword is a little bit complex Abis GUI is gtk2
but it's text field does not use pango for rendering and shaping of the
characters.
It uses a library called fribidi for rendering Arabic text, this lib has
for now still too many bugs... That's why you get bad rendering of
Arabic chars in special conditions.
You have to know that gtk2 is split in many packs, and one if them is
called Pango this is the utf rendering engine for gtk+2.x with it any
gtk+ app renders standard utf8 chars. So the funny thing is that the
Arabic GUI in Abi will be perfectly rendered but it's text field fails
to render correctly the chars.
Same thing goes for Firebird, firebird as being a browser uses its own
rendering engine called Gecko to render HTML,java-script, css etc...,
Well BUT there are mozilla versions compiled against gtk+ with xft
support so you can get with them perfect arabic support and Anti
Aliasing but I think they are only for the mozilla suite and only for
RH9 or Fedora. But with these builds (which I myself use) you can run on
top epiphany and you get a shoking quality, you get perfectly rendered
arabic sites. And a very nice browsing experience, I also translated
epiphany so if you use gnome and use the gtk enabled mozilla you'll have
a very good quality, maybe I'll ask anmar to add that mozilla to
Arabbix.
Which Abi is very simple: wait till the next Abi, and use the dev
versions: 2.1.x you'll have an Arabic interface and hopefully better
support, even if it is far from perfect!
yours
Arafat